The Fault in Our Hope
by sketchysword
Summary: Nagito Komaeda. Age sixteen. White haired and hopeful. Yet suffers of lung cancer. Trapped in a tunnel of despair, Komaeda cannot get out. Then, he finds someone special. His name is Hajime.


Chapter 1:

Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time thinking about despair.

Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of despair. (Cancer is also a side effect of despair. Almost everything is, really.) But my mom believed I required treatment, so she took me to see my Regular Doctor Mikan, who agreed that I was veritably swimming in a paralyzing and totally clinical depression, and that therefore my meds should be adjusted and also I should attend a weekly Support Group.

This Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of despair.

The Support Group, of course, was depressing as hell. It met every Wednesday in the basement of a stone-walled Episcopal church

shaped like a cross. We all sat in a circle right in the middle of the cross, where the two boards would have met, where the heart of Jesus

would have been.

I noticed this because Angie, the Support Group Leader and only person over eighteen in the room, talked about the heart of Jesus every freaking meeting, all about how we, as young cancer survivors, were sitting right in Christ's very sacred heart and whatever.

So here's how it went in God's heart: The six or seven or ten of us walked/wheeled in, grazed at a decrepit selection of cookies and lemonade, sat down in the Circle of Trust, and listened to Angie recount for the thousandth time her depressingly miserable life story— how she had cancer in her coochie and they thought she was going to die but she didn't die and now here he is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in Japan, divorced, addicted to video games, mostly friendless, checking out a meager living by exploiting his cancertastic past, slowly working his way toward a master's degree that will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles to give her the relief that she escaped lo those many years ago when cancer took her coochie but spared what only the most generous soul would call his life.

AND YOU TOO MIGHT BE SO LUCKY!

Then we introduced ourselves: Name. Age. Diagnosis. And how we're doing today. I'm Nagito, I'd say when they'd get to me. Sixteen. Thyroid originally but with an impressive and long-settled satellite colony in my lungs. And I'm doing okay.

Once we got around the circle, Angie always asked if anyone wanted to share. And then began the circle jerk of support: everyone talking about fighting and battling and winning and shrinking and scanning. To be fair to Angie, she let us talk about despair, too. But most of them weren't dying. Most would live into adulthood, as Angie had.

(Which meant there was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that's one in five ... so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.)

The only redeeming facet of Support Group was this kid named Kazuichi, a long-faced, skinny guy with straight pink hair swept over one eye.

And his eyes were the problem. He had some fantastically improbable eye cancer. One eye had been splashed out by soda when he was a kid, and now he wore the kind of thick glasses that made his eyes (both the real one and the glass one) preternaturally huge, like his whole head was basically just this fake eye and this real eye staring at you. From what I could gather on the rare occasions when Kazuichi shared with the group, a recurrence had placed his remaining eye in mortal peril.

Kazuichi and I communicated almost exclusively through sighs. Each time someone discussed anticancer diets or snorting ground-up shark fin or whatever, he'd glance over at me and sigh ever so slightly. I'd shake my head microscopically and exhale in response.

So Support Group blew, and after a few weeks, I grew to be rather kicking-and-screaming about the whole affair. In fact, on the Wednesday I made the acquaintance of Hajime Hinata, I tried my level best to get out of Support Group while sitting on the couch with my mom in the third leg of a twelve-hour marathon of the previous season's Japan's Next Top Model, which admittedly I had already seen, but still.

Me: "I refuse to attend Support Group."

Mom: "One of the symptoms of despair is disinterest in activities."

Me: "Please just let me watch Japan's Next Top Model. It's an activity."

Mom: "Television is a passivity."

Me: "Ugh, Mom, please."

Mom: "Komaeda, you're a teenager. You're not a little kid anymore. You need to make friends, get out of the house, and live your life."

Me: "If you want me to be a teenager, don't send me to Support Group. Buy me a fake ID so I can go to clubs, drink milk, and take pot."

Mom: "You don't take pot, for starters."

Me: "See, that's the kind of thing I'd know if you got me a fake ID."

Mom: "You're going to Support Group."

Me: "UGGGGGGGGGGGGG."

Mom: "Komaeda, you deserve a life."

That shut me up, although I failed to see how attendance at Support Group met the definition of life. Still, I agreed to go— after negotiating the right to record the 1.5 episodes of ANTM I'd be missing.

I went to Support Group for the same reason that I'd once allowed nurses with a mere eighteen months of graduate education to poison me with exotically named chemicals: I wanted to fill my parents with hope. There is only one thing in this world shiftier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's hope.

Mom pulled into the circular driveway behind the church at 4:56. I pretended to fiddle with my oxygen tank for a second just to kill time. "Do you want me to carry it in for you?"

"No, it's fine," I said. The cylindrical green tank only weighed a few pounds, and I had this little steel cart to wheel it around behind me.

It delivered two liters of oxygen to me each minute through a cannula, a transparent tube that split just beneath my neck, wrapped behind my ears, and then reunited in my nostrils. The contraption was necessary because my lungs sucked at being lungs.

"I love you," she said as I got out.

"You too, Mom. See you at six."

"Make friends!" she said through the rolled-down window as I walked away.

I didn't want to take the elevator because taking the elevator is a Last Days kind of activity at Support Group, so I took the stairs. I grabbed a cookie and poured some lemonade into a Dixie cup and then turned around.

A boy was staring at me.

I was quite sure I'd never seen him before. Long and leanly m, he dwarfed the molded plastic elementary school chair he was sitting in. Brown hair, straight and short. He looked my age, maybe a year older, and he sat with his tailbone against the edge of the chair, his posture aggressively neat, one hand half in a pocket of dark jeans.

I looked away, suddenly conscious of my myriad insufficiencies. I was wearing old jeans, which had once been tight but now sagged in weird places, and a yellow T-shirt advertising a band I didn't even like anymore. Also my hair: I had this cotton candy haircut, and I hadn't even bothered to, like, brush it. Furthermore, I had ridiculously fat chipmunked cheeks, a side effect of treatment. I looked like a normally proportioned person with a balloon for a head. This was not even to mention the cankle situation. And yet— I cut a glance to him, and his eyes were still on me.

It occurred to me why they call it eye contact.

I walked into the circle and sat down next to Kazuichi, two seats away from the boy. I glanced again. He was still watching me.

Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault.

But a hot boy . . . well.

I pulled out my phone and clicked it so it would display the time: 4:59. The circle filled in with the unlucky twelve-to-eighteens, and then Angie started us out with the serenity prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. The guy was still staring at me. I felt rather blushy.

Finally, I decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. Boys do not have a monopoly on the Staring Business, after all. So I looked him over as Angie acknowledged for the thousandth time her lack of coochie etc., and soon it was a staring contest. After a while the boy smiled, and then finally his olive eyes glanced away. When he looked back at me, I flicked my eyebrows up to say, / win.

He shrugged. Angie continued and then finally it was time for the introductions. "Kazuichi, perhaps you'd like to go first today. I know you're facing a challenging time."

"Yeah," Kazuichi said. "I'm Kazuichi. I'm seventeen. And it's looking like I have to get surgery in a couple weeks, after which I'll be blind. Not to complain or anything because I know a lot of us have it worse, but yeah, I mean, being blind does sort of suck. My girlfriend helps, though, and friends like Hajime." He nodded toward the boy, who now had a name. "So, yeah," Kazuichi continued. He was looking at his hands, which he'd folded into each other like the top of a tepee. "There's nothing you can do about it."

"We're here for you, Kazuichi," Angie said. "Let Kazuichi hear it, guys." And then we all, in a monotone, said, "We're here for you, Kazuichi."

Ryoma was next. He was twelve. He had leukemia. He'd always had leukemia. He was okay. (Or so he said. He'd taken the elevator.)

Sayaka was sixteen, and pretty enough to be the object of the hot boy's eye. She was a regular— in a long remission from appendiceal cancer, which I had not previously known existed. She said— as she had every other time I'd attended Support Group— that she felt strong, which felt like bragging to me as the oxygen-drizzling nubs tickled my nostrils.

There were five others before they got to him. He smiled a little when his turn came. His voice was low, smoky, and dead sexy. "My name is Hajime Hinata," he said. "I'm seventeen. I had a little touch of osteosarcoma a year and a half ago, but I'm just here today at Kazuichi's request."

"And how are you feeling?" asked Angie.

"Oh, I'm grand." Hajime Hinata smiled with a corner of his mouth. "I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend."

When it was my turn, I said, "My name is Nagito. I'm sixteen. Thyroid with mets in my lungs. I'm okay."

The hour proceeded apace: Fights were recounted, battles won amid wars sure to be lost; hope was clung to; families were both celebrated and denounced; it was agreed that friends just didn't get it; tears were shed; comfort proffered. Neither Hajime Hinata nor I spoke again until Angie said, "Hajime, perhaps you'd like to share your fears with the group."

"My fears?"

"Yes."

"I fear despair," he said without a moment's pause. "I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark."

"Too soon," Kazuichi said, cracking a smile.

"Was that insensitive?" Hajime asked. "I can be pretty blind to other people's feelings."

Kazuichi was laughing, but Angie raised a chastening finger and said, "Hajime, please. Let's return to you and your struggles. You said you fear Despair?"

"I did," Hajime answered.

Angie seemed lost. "Would, uh, would anyone like to speak to that?"

I hadn't been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an artist who did not know I existed. I was a fairly shy person— not the hand-raising type.

And yet, just this once, I decided to speak. I half raised my hand and Angie, his delight evident, immediately said, "Nagito!" I was, I'm sure she assumed, opening up. Becoming Part Of The Group.

I looked over at Hajime Hinata, who looked back at me. You could almost see through his eyes they were so green. "There will come a time," I said, "when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this"— I gestured encompassingly— "will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not

survive forever. There was a time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human despair worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does."

I'd learned this from my aforementioned third best friend, Kanye West, the reclusive artist of Undertale, the game that was as close a thing as I had to a Bible. Kanye West was the only person I'd ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it's

like to be dying, and (b) not have died.

After I finished, there was quite a long period of silence as I watched a smile spread all the way across Hajime's face— not the little crooked smile of the boy trying to be sexy while he stared at me, but his real smile, too big for his face. "Goddamn," Hajime said quietly. "Aren't you something else."

Neither of us said anything for the rest of Support Group. At the end, we all had to hold hands, and Angie led us in a prayer. "Lord Jesus Christ, we are gathered here in Your heart, literally in Your heart, as cancer survivors. You and You alone know us as we know

ourselves. Guide us to life and the Light through our times of trial. We pray for Kazuichi's eyes, for Ryomas's blood, for Hajime's bones, for Komaeda's lungs, for Yasuhiro's throat. We pray that You might heal us and that we might feel Your love, and Your peace, which passes all understanding. And we remember in our hearts those whom we knew and loved who have gone home to you: Leon and Hifumi and Teruteru and Kokichi and Kaede and Toko and Gonta and . . ."

It was a long list. The world contains a lot of dead people. And while Angie droned on, reading the list from a sheet of paper because it was too long to memorize, I kept my eyes closed, trying to think prayerfully but mostly imagining the day when my name would find its way onto that list, all the way at the end when everyone had stopped listening.

When Angie was finished, we said this stupid mantra together— LIVING OUR BEST LIFE TODAY— and it was over. Hajime Hinata pushed himself out of his chair and walked over to me. His gait was crooked like his smile. He towered over me, but he kept his distance so I wouldn't have to crane my neck to look him in the eye. "What's your name?" he asked.

"Nagito."

"No, your full name."

"Urn, Nagito Komaeda." He was just about to say something else when Kazuichi walked up. "Hold on," Hajime said, raising a finger, and turned to Kazuichi. "That was actually worse than you made it out to be."

"I told you it was bleak."

"Why do you bother with it?"

"I don't know. It kind of helps?"

Hajime leaned in so he thought I couldn't hear. "He's a regular?" I couldn't hear Kazuichi's comment, but Hajime responded, "I'll say."

He clasped Kazuichi by both shoulders and then took a half step away from him. "Tell Nagito about clinic."

Kazuichi leaned a hand against the snack table and focused his huge eye on me. "Okay, so I went into clinic this morning, and I was telling my surgeon that I'd rather be gay than blind. And he said, It doesn't work that way,' and I was, like, 'Yeah, I realize it doesn't work that way; I'm just saying I'd rather be gaythan blind if I had the choice, which I realize I don't have,' and he said, 'Well, the good news is that you won't be gay,' and I was like, Thank you for explaining that my eye cancer isn't going to make me gay. I feel so fortunate that an intellectual giant like yourself would deign to operate on me.'"

"He sounds like a winner," I said. "I'm gonna try to get me some eye cancer just so I can make this guy's boyfriend."

"Good luck with that. All right, I should go. Sonia's waiting for me. I gotta look at her a lot while I can."

"Counterinsurgence tomorrow?" Hajime asked.

"Definitely." Kazuichi turned and ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

Hajime Hinata turned to me. "Literally," he said.

"Literally?" I asked.

"We are literally in the heart of Jesus," he said. "I thought we were in a church basement, but we are literally in the heart of Jesus."

"Someone should tell Jesus," I said. "I mean, it's gotta be dangerous, storing children with cancer in your heart."

"I would tell Him myself," Hajime said, "but unfortunately I am literally stuck inside of His heart, so He won't be able to hear me." I laughed. He shook his head, just looking at me.

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing," he said.

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

Hajime half smiled. "Because you're hopeful. I enjoy looking at hopeful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence." A brief awkward silence ensued. Augustus plowed through: "I mean, particularly given that, as you so deliciously pointed out, all of this will end in oblivion and everything."

I kind of scoffed or sighed or exhaled in a way that was vaguely coughy and then said, "I'm not that hop—"

"You're like a millennial Kaworu Nagisa. Like Neon Genesis Evangelion Kaworu Nagisa."

"Never seen it," I said.

"Really?" he asked. "White haired twink and can't help but fall for a boy he knows is depressed. It's your autobiography, so far as I can tell."

His every syllable flirted. Honestly, he kind of turned me on. I didn't even know that guys could turn me on— not, like, in real life.

A younger girl walked past us. "How's it going, Mahiru?" he asked. She smiled and mumbled, "Hi, Hajime." "Memorial people," he explained. Memorial was the big research hospital. "Where do you go?"

"Children's," I said, my voice smaller than I expected it to be. He nodded. The conversation seemed over. "Well," I said, nodding vaguely toward the steps that led us out of the Literal Heart of Jesus. I tilted my cart onto its wheels and started walking. He limped beside me. "So, see you next time, maybe?" I asked.

"You should see it," he said. "Neon Genesis Evangelion, I mean."

"Okay," I said. "I'll look it up."

"No. With me. At my house," he said. "Now."

I stopped walking. "I hardly know you, Hajime Hinata. You could be an ax murderer."

He nodded. "True enough, Nagito Komaeda." He walked past me, his shoulders filling out his white polo shirt, his back straight, his steps lilting just slightly to the right as he walked steady and confident on what I had determined was a prosthetic leg. Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. Then, if it likes you, it takes the rest.

I followed him upstairs, losing ground as I made my way up slowly, stairs not being a field of expertise for my lungs. And then we were out of Jesus's heart and in the parking lot, the spring air just on the cold side of perfect, the late-afternoon light heavenly in its hurtfulness.

Mom wasn't there yet, which was unusual, because Mom was almost always waiting for me. I glanced around and saw that a tall, curvy blonde girl had Kazuichi pinned against the stone wall of the church, kissing him rather aggressively. They were close enough to me that I could hear the weird noises of their mouths together, and I could hear him saying, "coochie," and her saying, "coochie," in return.

Suddenly standing next to me, Hajime half whispered, "They're big believers in PDA."

"What's with the 'coochie'?" The slurping sounds intensified.

"Coochie is their thing. They'll always love each other and whatever. I would conservatively estimate they have texted each other the word coochie four million times in the last year."

A couple more cars drove up, taking Ryoma and Akane away. It was just Hajime and me now, watching Kazuichi and Sonia, who proceeded apace as if they were not leaning against a place of worship. His hand reached for her boob over her shirt and pawed at it, his

palm still while his fingers moved around. I wondered if that felt good. Didn't seem like it would, but I decided to forgive Kazuichi on the grounds that he was going blind. The senses must feast while there is yet hunger and whatever.

"Imagine taking that last drive to the hospital," I said quietly. "The last time you'll ever drive a car."

Without looking over at me, Hajime said, "You're killing my vibe here, Nagito Komaeda. I'm trying to observe young love in its many- splendored awkwardness."

"I think he's hurting her boob," I said.

"Yes, it's difficult to ascertain whether he is trying to arouse her or perform a breast exam." Then Hajime Hinata reached into a pocket and pulled out, of all things, a pack of cigarettes. He flipped it open and put a cigarette between his lips.

"Are you serious?" I asked. "You think that's cool? Oh, my God, you just ruined the whole thing."

"Which whole thing?" he asked, turning to me. The cigarette dangled unlit from the unsmiling corner of his mouth.

"The whole thing where a boy who is not unattractive or unintelligent or seemingly in any way unacceptable stares at me and points out incorrect uses of literality and compares me to a anime boy and asks me to watch a beloved franchise at his house. But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER. Oh, my God. Let me just assure you that not being able to breathe? SUCKS. Totally disappointing. Totally."

"A hamartia?" he asked, the cigarette still in his mouth. It tightened his jaw. He had a hell of a jawline, unfortunately.

"A fatal flaw," I explained, turning away from him. I stepped toward the curb, leaving Hajime Hinata behind me, and then I heard a car start down the street. It was Mom. She'd been waiting for me to, like, make friends or whatever.

I felt this weird mix of disappointment and anger welling up inside of me. I don't even know what the feeling was, really, just that there was a lot of it, and I wanted to smack Hajime Hinata and also replace my lungs with lungs that didn't suck at being lungs. I was standing with my Yeezy's on the very edge of the curb, the oxygen tank ball-and-chaining in the cart by my side, and right as my mom pulled up, I felt a hand grab mine.

I yanked my hand free but turned back to him.

"They don't kill you unless you light them," he said as Mom arrived at the curb. "And I've never lit one. It's a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing."

"It's a metaphor," I said, dubious. Mom was just idling.

"It's a metaphor," he said.

"You choose your behaviors based on their metaphorical resonances ..." I said.

"Oh, yes." He smiled. The big, goofy, real smile. "I'm a big believer in metaphor, Nagito Komaeda."

I turned to the car. Tapped the window. It rolled down. "I'm going to a movie with Hajime Hinata," I said. "Please record the next several episodes of the ANTM marathon for me."


End file.
